Let's Read: King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

Remember the 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? I don't blame you. Comic fans may recall the franchise with more warmth, but for those of you who need a recap, it concerns the banding together of Victorian England's finest pseudo-superheroes in a historic mash up that includes everyone from Captain Nemo to The Invisible Man. You might remember those characters, and you might even recall Mina Harker of Dracula fame, but you'll probably find yourself scratching your head when Sean Connery introduces himself as Alan Quartermain. Connery gave his final performance playing this character, who actually hearkens from H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel, King Solomon's Mines, a story of adventure, diamonds, elephant hunting and awkward racial stereotypes.

Though British works in the nineteenth century can be dense and stodgy, Haggard's novel feels more like a modern day Hollywood picture. It's violent, immediate, irreverent, and more than a little ridiculous. Quartermain narrates an ill-omened journey that takes him and his compatriots deep into the uncharted wilderness on an Indiana Jones roller-coaster, all while spouting the doctrine of the nineteenth century imperialist. For the uninitiated, it's a great way to catch up on the thoughts and habits of colonial Britain without any ballrooms or royal academies to get in the way.

The first thing you'll notice about King Solomon's Mines is the violence. This violence isn't the studied social commentary of A Tale of Two Cities, but the rollicking action scenes of airport novels. When Quartermain goes elephant hunting, an unfortunate guide steps in the path of a rampaging beast. The result: "the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing his huge foot on to his body about the middle, twined his trunk round his upper part and tore him in two." Those are Haggard's italics, not mine. This scene lets us know right away that the tale won't shy away from gruesome violence. It also tells us that Haggard doesn't mind killing native Africans in his story, and we quickly learn that he uses non-Europeans like Star Trek uses redshirts. In fact, while entire armies of resident Africans bite the dust during the novel's climactic sequences, only one European comes to mortal harm, and that years before the plot even gets going.

I suppose we don't expect novels of the era to have a right-minded approach to racial issues, but Haggard inserts a few especially egregious examples. One European character manages a romance of sorts with a native woman, though she ends that subplot with "I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black." No one contradicts the statement, and Quartermain later praises her good sense. Even the story's primary native character can't help but spread the stereotypes with his statement "The ways of black people are not as the ways of white men... nor do we value life so highly." Sure, that character goes on to become a visionary leader, but that's only with the invaluable assistance of white men. The natives can't even depose their own dictator, it takes a European wielding a battle-ax to finally behead the tyrant, in another display of gloriously graphic violence. "For a second the corpse stood upright, the blood spurting in fountains from the severed arteries; then with a dull crash it fell to the earth."

So King Solomon's Mines isn't the most forward thinking of nineteenth century texts, but it's an easy read, and you can get the whole thing for free over at Project Gutenburg. It's definitely more gripping than some modern entertainment writing, and once you've read it you're officially indoctrinated in classical literature. If nothing else, you can watch League of Extraordinary Gentlemen again just to see how horribly they messed up the character. Enjoy.